Upgrade - 220: Mr. Apple Pencil

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

This week we follow up on our iPad Pro reviews, as Jason integrates the new iPad Pro into his writing set-up and starts using the Apple Pencil for more than just drawing doodles. Plus there's more about external keyboards, Apple's dream of Academy Awards, and a heaping dose of #askupgrade.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 220 today's show is brought to you by pingdom fresh books and lunar display my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hello mike hurley hello can you see me through the the horrible smoke actually that's outside by Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Mike Hurley. How are you, Jason Snell? Can you see me through the horrible smoke, actually, that's outside my window right now? I got the air filter running, and I'm breathing in air that is hopefully filtered a little bit. Yeah, there is, I mean, you know,

we shouldn't spend a ton of time about it because this is a fun show, but there are just some horrible things happening in California right now. Yeah, pretty much. It's really, really terrible. It's breaking my heart. I'm going to put some links in the show notes to the Red Cross if you want to donate to help with the fires that are happening in California right now. Our hearts go out to the people that are dealing with this situation. Yeah, I definitely, I grew up in, not that far north, but in the Foothill region. And I actually know people who have family who were in that area. And then there's some stuff in Southern California that's really bad too. So – but it's – yeah, it's quite a disaster.

It's awful. And it is terrible air quality for more than a week and a half here in the Bay Area too. And we're very far away. And the whole Central Valley is covered in smoke too and it's bad. So it's a tragedy happening in places where the fire is burning. And then there's actually millions and millions of people affected beyond that in terms of not being able to go outside or having to flee to areas with clear air or into buildings that are filtered air if they don't. that are filtered air if they don't uh a lot of smart people actually have an apple related thing here which is um a lot of very clever smart people in california who want to save energy and be good for the environment built buildings that uh use natural outdoor air as their uh ventilation system including apple park and i wonder there was that axios did that interview

with tim cook uh this weekend on their HBO show. It was great to see. And they're doing it at Apple Park. And they've got the whole interior of the ring behind them as they're doing this interview with Tim Cook. But you could see how smoky it was in the background there. And I'm sitting there thinking, I wonder if Apple has any air filtration system as a part of their natural air ventilation because the problem with building that really clever building that lets in air from the outside is what if the air from outside is toxic so i wonder if there's somebody out there who knows let us know i'm that's the story angle story angle i'm i'm concerned about now is uh you know if the air gets bad

in cooper tino can you not work in apple park i don't know but anyway it's yeah there's some links to the red cross um in case you're interested in finding out more in our show notes uh and again you know our hearts go out to those affected but we should get on with the show uh we should start with hashtag snell talk and this one comes from mike not me a different mike mike wants to know jason if you could switch siri to a celebrity voice or a character voice which voice would you choose and why um there was a time when i probably would say homer simpson just because i think it would be funny and i really like that there were those gps uh things that had homer simpson in it but i'm gonna say and this is um this is a uh i just did two podcasts about this on the incomparable and actually the voice uh the actor who played this character's

voice just passed away uh last weekend and it is douglas rain who played Hal 9000 in 2001 and 2010. And it is an amazing voice performance if you have not seen those movies or haven't seen them in a long time. He is the very calm, quiet voice of a computer who's probably trying to kill you. Is that what you want though? I think that would be hilarious. I think it would be hilarious to have the killer robot. Oh, by the way, if you ask Siri questions that were asked of Hal in 2001,

it will indicate that it doesn't think that's funny, which I also enjoy. Don't ask Siri to open the pod bay doors because it doesn't think that's funny at all. I don't ask siri to open the pod bay doors because it doesn't think that's funny at all i don't necessarily have a great answer for this but i feel like just like a traditionally great voice would be good like a morgan freeman or something you know some just some some person who narrates documentaries or something like that or or like um uh oh who is it um david attenborough yeah that would be good either either one one of them's alive one of them's dead david is the is the documenter and

so no i was thinking um what if it's uh werner herzog the weather today might be unpleasant something like that I don't know thank you to Mike for sending in that suggestion if you would like to send in a question to open the show the hashtag snail talk is the way to do that Jason it is merch time

we have amazing upgrade merch tis the season for merchandise you can go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com or you can find a link in our show notes to uh some merchandise we're selling a few things we're selling some stuff you know like the uh upgrade hoodie and the upgrade official logo tee which you can get in black on black which is the best just the best combo but we have some new items we have the very first official dongle town merchandise we're selling two dongle town t-shirts uh one in orange and one in navy um they say

dongle town california port authority on them they're incredible i love them dearly um people seem very excited about these t-shirts so far which is great i i enjoy that people enjoy this as much as we do because it's a funny thing but they've been designed by the wonderful simon very very well so they look good they just look like good t-shirts yeah i think somebody who doesn't get computer stuff will look at this and assume that this is just a you know generic t-shirt from hollister california or whatever right but it's actually from dongle town with a usbc port uh silhouette uh you established 2015 when the macbook came out and so you can become when we created dongle town that was when we found dongle town on this show

at some point um i'm pretty sure it was an upgrade was the first uttering of dongle town but here it is um also something i'm very excited about so of the t-shirts and the hoodie uh they're going to be on sale until december 4th um we're taking part in a cotton bureau campaign called all the teas they have information about that on their website but it's like a great giveaway thing that they're doing but we also have a limited number of enamel pins of the upgrade logo now we have a limited number of these when they're gone they're gone it is just the wonderful little red logo with the up arrow in the u shape the power icon that we have they're available too so you can go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com for those uh we enjoy this stuff it's a fun thing and i i heard you talking about this on the secret uh subscriber podcast at six colors we mostly make this

merchandise just because we want to have it because we think it's fun um and we hope that you'll enjoy it too so you can go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com um to to find out more and if you buy any merchandise we appreciate it but talking about it being the season there's a few other things there's a bunch of wonderful incomparable merchandise available now uh which you can get um at the incomparable.com slash shirt uh there's lots there's hats for the first time i bought a zeppelin pin which i'm super excited about and there's also uh at the relay fm store there'll be a link to these in the show notes but you can find it on cotton bureau too we are selling um airpods stickers which we've done a

few times so they're little stickers you can put on your airpods to make them look like dental floss but we're selling the two of these in a pack with an enamel pin on it as well so you can go and find that as well i know lots of people ask me they want the AirPod stickers and we're selling them again. So all the great merch. Yeah, yep, yep. It is the season. Find a reason to buy yourself or your family or your friends

or put it in your stocking and say, oh, I didn't know a Dongletown t-shirt was in here. Whatever, however you want to do it. It's fun to do it. We do these not just because people seem to like them, and also because we like them and we want them for ourselves. So it's a fun time.

And the podcast is still free, so you don't need to buy the merch. If you don't want to, but it's great. And the Dongletown t-shirt, I think it's going to be a winner. We've had that design for a while now, and we've just been sitting wait we want it so badly yeah we want that we want that shirt exactly the orange shirt it's my favorite black on the orange shirt johnny eyes favorite color it looks great but there's also one where it's it's in more traditional colors like on a darker shirt because orange is orange you know it's like it's bright i would say like they're talking about us in the chat room i see and hear dongle town all over the place now it's it seems to be uh

it's our follow-up you know i guess so it's caught on jason snell it's cool i guess so i i would love somebody uh one of our esteemed researchers out there to identify the original um coining of dongle town on upgrade where that where was that because i don't remember now but it was probably in 2015 i would guess although i don't know you would expect it was around the time of that macbook right yeah but i don't know if it was or if it was when the macbook pros came out or what i i don't i don't remember at all i remember it's something along the lines of me saying come on down to Dongletown I think it was just something that just popped out of my mouth

I kind of couldn't really stop it sounds right, sounds like you yeah, that sounds like me you probably said it in that mic tone of voice too November 7th, 2016 the episode is called Get On Down to Dongletown and it's all about the MacBook Pro November 7th, 2016, the episode is called Get on Down to Dongletown. And it's all about the MacBook Pro.

Okay. That may be it. It is two words, Dongletown. Yeah, we've upgraded it over the years to be one word, Dongletown. I still have this idea in my head of the English Twin Town, which is Dongleton. Yes, Dongleton. Yeah. We'll do a follow-up t-shirt next year with Dongleton in old English lettering.

There's like a pub. There's like, you know, Dongleton arms. Yes, and it'll be ye olde port authority. And the Dongleton t-shirt predates the USB-C on the iPad Pro too, which is great because we are so deep down into that, the suburbs of Dongleton now. So it's great.

All right, we should move on with the show just talk about a couple of items of follow-up uh one we both received the bridge 10.5 keyboard so the bridge keyboard for the 10.5 inch ipad pro um it is as great as we would want it to be uh you know like it it is just as good as the 12.9-inch one. It's super tiny and cute in a fun way. It is adorable. I wished that I had this when I was using the 10.5 because it only makes it an even better travel computer, I think. So if you do own the 10.5-inch iPad Pro

and you're looking for a keyboard, get the big thumbs up on this one again. And they do this one in a bunch of colors too a great little writing machine it was i used to say about the uh original 9.7 ipad pro that you could put it with that logitech case and you had this great little compact like perfect portable writing machine for somebody who is maybe even not super technical but like is a is a is a writer a novelist a novelist, a, you know, a computer tech writer, a, you know, anything in between those things that it was good. I think now what I would

say is the equivalent of that is, and it's still for sale too, is that 10.5 iPad pro with this bridge keyboard, because it's a, uh, the keys are, it's very typable. The keys are a little bit narrower than a standard key layout, but, but it's very easy to type on. And it turns your iPad, your 10.5, into a laptop when it's in the little clips. And the beauty of it is, unlike a laptop, you just pull it out and then it's back to being an iPad again. It's nice. It's funny that it has arrived at the time when the 10.5 is now not gone, but no longer as relevant because there are new models. And Bridge is working on new models of the keyboard for the new models of iPad. But if you've got a 10.5 or are thinking of getting a 10.5 instead of one of the new models because they're too pricey for you, and you're thinking about the you might want to look into this bridge keyboard because it is it's very good yeah so i really really recommend it um on the last episode i was talking about my frustration of the way that you take

screenshots now on the new ipad pros we have to do it with like one volume button and the side button as it's called and dr drang reminded me that if i'm using my keyboard i can just use command shift three or command shift four to take screenshots i always forget about this i forget this exists all the time but it's great yeah it's good i i find myself rarely taking screenshots with a keyboard attached but that's just because most of the ipad screenshots i'm taking are sort of like a things while I'm, I'm not, I don't have a keyboard attached most of the time. Yeah. You see, I'm very small. Isn't it? Like I am, my iPad is always has the keyboard. Like it, I think we're in the inverse. Like the times that you have the keyboard on is like when I would have

the keyboard off. So yeah, it's changing a little bit with the, with the new keyboard because I think the new keyboard is a much, um, it's much more likely that I'll keep that around than the old keyboard. But yeah, yeah, it's true. We are different. You are a very, very keyboard-centric person on your iPad and I'm not. Don't forget next week we're going to be going back to Mike at the Movies with my neighbor Totoro. We have an Ask Upgrade question on this, which I guess we'll just answer now. going back to Mike at the Movies with my neighbor Totoro. We haven't asked up great questions on this, which I guess we'll just answer

now. Jake asked, is there any streaming service that has the Studio Ghibli movies on it? No, no there isn't. I found this out. This movie's hard to get, so if you are planning to watch my neighbor Totoro for our discussion next week, you may want to get to

Amazon and get a Blu-ray or a DVD as soon as possible because that seems to be the only way to do it. So it's unfortunate when these things aren't on streaming services. Are they in the Disney vault? Is that the problem? No. In fact, they're no longer published by Disney.

They're now published by GKids. But it is Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli in general that they don't they they don't believe in the streaming services it's very funny they just basically they're they say no and i do wonder if at some point they will have you know they will make a deal somewhere and it will be on some streaming service but right now they're just not they're not interested in digital distribution in that way so you you have to you have to get the discs basically and i have them all yep just either go to jason's house um or go to amazon one or the other really and the upgrade is voting is still going we have had

hundreds of votes for the upgrade is so far which i'm super excited about i'm really really pleased to see that um so you can go to our show notes, you can find our nominations form for the fifth annual Upgradees. So very, very excited about that. So you still can take part. Give us your votes. We're going to be announcing the closing date over the next few weeks, but it's best to get your vote in now so you don't forget. So that will be in our show notes. And I have one item of upstream for you today, Jason, which is Apple related. Apple have inked a deal with the Oscar winning studio A24 to develop a selection of movies for their upcoming streaming service. It is a multi year agreement. A24, if you don't know who they are i didn't know the name they are responsible for

films like moonlight which won the best picture in 2016 um and room the witch and ex machina have been some of their more popular movies so i found this interesting because it's not just tv that they're doing yeah here's here's their film strategy right this is here here we are we we speculated about this about are they going to just do TV? Because Netflix and Amazon both have original films as well, and obviously would not be investing in them as they are if they didn't find them effective. I'm fascinated by it because I have very rarely watched an original film on either of those streaming services. I just- Me too. watched an original film on either of those streaming services i just me too it just has

never never really clicked for me that oh here's a movie premiere on netflix that i want to watch maybe maybe they will turn the corner at some point and and and do that but it just it has never really gotten into me but obviously it has worked for them because uh also as our friends in the entertainment industry point out, the other part of this is awards, which is not to be discounted. Which is, if you're Netflix, if you're Amazon, if you're Apple, the prospect of winning an Academy Award is worth spending money on films for. spending money on films for. And there's an argument to be made that films of a quality level to win an Academy Award these days, the kind of funding that they're going to get for the budgets of a prestige kind of film, this is money that they may have a hard time getting elsewhere to make a deal with Netflix or Amazon or Apple. So that's fascinating as a dynamic too, that so many mainstream Hollywood

releases these days are big blockbusters. That's sort of what the game is. And that the prestige films that win Oscars may not be in that category. They might find a harder time getting made, but Netflix and Amazon and Apple seem to be very interested in that. So it's not just that audiences may enjoy original films on these platforms. It's also, I think, some desire to win prestige through the Academy Awards. Yeah, I think it's like they want to just get eyes, right? Awards bring eyeballs. Well, right. It's good prestige. It's good marketing. Everybody's talking about that movie and it's only on Apple's service or it's only on amazon that is like uh when manchester by the sea got nominated for a bunch of oscars that was interesting because that was an amazon movie

and it was on amazon and so if you wanted to see it you had to go to prime video and watch it well it's like amazon had that um they had that tv show transparent that won a bunch of awards too right like and i know it got a bunch of people talking sure tv awards prestige i mean that's big too but then there's a whole other award category you get for making a movie so yeah and arguably like more people pay attention to the movie awards than the tv awards i think yeah all right today's episode is brought to you by fresh books everyone loves to save time but it's especially important when you're a freelancer, you work for yourself, you set your own time. Your time, time is money, as they say, Jason. And our friends at FreshBooks can help you save tons of time, hundreds of hours with their super simple cloud accounting software for freelancers. I know they say, I can't even imagine how much time FreshBooks has saved me

over the last five years. I think we're up to like, we get, we're very soon approaching our 2000th invoice sent out with FreshBooks over the history of our company. And their system is so simple. Like I go in and I've got all my client information there. It's all there. I can just generate an invoice super quickly. I type in some stuff and it auto completes and I see the invoice and I send it out so much faster than me me like opening pages and typing it out and getting the template and then sending it and then having to like chase someone next week when they are not sure if they saw it or not.

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It's wonderful. They have like a payment system built right in that you can take advantage of. You can set up automatic late payment email reminders if you want to. And every time you log into FreshBooks, they tell you what's changed in your business since you last logged in and what you need to deal with. You can see what's late if you want to. You can see if somebody's logged in, which is super useful, right? Like if you're waiting on a client, you see they've logged in or maybe they're checking the invoice. It's really, really important stuff. And if you do any invoicing, any time tracking, any expenses stuff, you should be looking at FreshBooks. They're offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial to listeners of this very show

with no credit card required. Just go to freshbooks.com upgrade. And when they say, hey, how did you hear about us say on the upgrade podcast our thanks to fresh books for their continued support of this show and relay fm so jason you've just completed some huge reviews right so many many many many thousands of words yes left your brain through your fingertips over the last couple of weeks congratulations on doing that. That's not where I thought you were going with that. I really thought it had left my brain,

had oozed out of my brain through my fingertips. Oh, no! No, I've lost my brains at my fingertips. Yeah. And it's been distributed to the world who's read them, and everybody's happy. Last week, we talked about my iPad Pro review, which is up, and we can put a link into the show notes to it, I suppose.

And we'll talk about it later, but that was 5,000 words that came out of my brain. And I wrote that entirely, that one I wrote entirely on the smart keyboard folio on the iPad Pro. Right, so this is what I want to get into, right? Considering you've gone through all of this, I'm interested in seeing what your writing setup is

right now from a software and hardware perspective. And if spending such a time looking at and writing so many thousands of words has made you rethink or reconsider anything based upon any frustrations you may have felt during this period of time. Well, I, so I'm reminded that I like the, I like the smart keyboard. There are some people who don't like the feel of it. I like the feel of it. I think it is, it is solid. It's not, you know, it's not my favorite, but it works fine and I can get into a groove on it and write on it and it's not a problem. Although what I am finding is that it's way too easy for me to press the little globe button in the bottom left corner and pick up the emoji keyboard when I don't want to. I hit that a lot by accident.

But it's good. And it's stable on my lap, which is really the thing that is most important to me is that I can sit on the couch or even in bed and have the ability to write things with the keyboard, which the old old one you could do it but i never liked it it never felt comfortable to me because it was much less stable um and also the keyboard being that single plane instead of it being folded over a bunch of times and having the thick part and the thin part like this to the point where like i measured it i weighed all of these the uh the the 12.9 keyboard folio is heavier than the old 12.9 keyboard um by quite a bit like 406 grams to 338 grams it's heavier

and yet to me it doesn't feel bulkier and that's weird but it doesn't because it is just wrapping around the device uh rather than having that extra thickness and all of that. And it's not as clumsy. It's a funny feeling. So I'm liking that. I will say that when I get my hands on a bridge keyboard for the new iPad Pro, I'm going to be excited about that because I think that that will be fantastic um and then a funny thing came up last week because i took a picture of the new ipad pro in that uh that doc that i tweeted about a long time ago and grouper asked me what it was and all that which is the the viazon doc i've got that doc i've also got that other doc that you have i have both of them the tabitha yeah and the um and they're both they both have their

advantages um the tabitha is a little bit taller the viazon dock i feels nicer because it doesn't have little spindly plastic it's a little bit more secure feeling yeah and a little less fiddly too so i but i was using the viazon dock and i took a picture of it with the, uh, my keyboard just attached via directly via USB C via an adapter rather than routed through the USB three adapter for lightning with power, which is sort of the other way, or I might've even just had it be a Bluetooth keyboard. But anyway, I did that and I brought up, uh, I think I had drafts on the screen and people were like, Oh, are you writing in drafts now? And I was like, no, actually, that's just, I brought that up for, because I was checking something out that somebody mentioned about a drafts update, but I don't write in drafts.

And somebody was saying, well, you should give it a try. There's drafts for Mac is in beta now, and you could try it out. And I realized this is one of those funny things where I've built this little writing workflow around my preferences, which is kind of funny. So I write on BBEdit on my Mac, unless I'm like working on a novel or something, I'm writing BBEdit on my Mac. Long form stuff I will put in Scrivener, but most stuff I write is in BBEdit. And BBEdit is a Mac only, there's no iOS equivalent, but it does text files. And so what I've created is this whole system where I, all of my default, I even have the default folder app, default BBEdit to a folder called stories, which is on my Dropbox. And the stories go in the stories folder.

And that means that they're available via Dropbox in that folder. I have set my writing app on my iPad, which is currently OneWriter, to connect to Dropbox and look in the stories folder. So when I go on OneWriter, or if I create a story there, it goes in that same stories folder. me round trip stuff where I can start a story here on my, on my Mac and BB edit, take the iPad out and pick up where I right where I left off because it's looking in that same folder. And then I actually have a, um, a Hazel script that runs a Hazel rule that runs on my Mac. Uh, and Hazel is this utility that'll do all sorts of things like watching folders and waiting for, uh, certain conditions. And then it, it springs into action and Hazel is this utility that'll do all sorts of things like watching folders and waiting for certain conditions. And then it springs into action. And Hazel takes everything older than like a month out of the stories folder and puts it in a old stories folder. So I still have that stuff, but I want to kind of keep the stories folder to only the really the recent stuff that I've been working on.

And that system is actually working really well for me. It gives me the freedom to use any iOS text editor that has Dropbox connectivity, which not all of them do. And if I there was a fantastic iOS text editor out there, and it only worked with iCloud Drive or something I would consider I, I could modify my system to do that. But I realized that that's where I am with my kind of writing setup now is I want to keep using BBM on the desktop. And then I find something and I'm open that OneWriter is working for me right now. And actually, while I was writing the iPad Pro review, I think I might've mentioned this last week. It literally updated in the middle of a paragraph about how you have to update apps to support the new screen sizes of the iPad Pro models. I was like, I wonder. And I went to the App Store app and looked for updates.

And there was a one writer update that updated it to work better with the screen. It was one of those moments like, okay. And then I went back and I continued writing my my apps must be updated it's kind of wild it was it was it was weird it was very weird so anyway that's working for me now i would be happy like one writer gets occasional updates it's okay uh i have i i have yet to find a uh a text editor that syncs to Dropbox and does Markdown and ideally has some, you know, either good commands or programmable macros and all that. I, you know, it's, I used editorial for a long time, but it hasn't been updated in a long time. I'm kind of open in a way that I'm, let's be honest, I'm not on the Mac. Like BBA, I've been writing in for 20 years. It seems unlikely. I

think that's what I said to the person who told me about drafts. I said, I'm not saying never say never, right? I'm not saying that I'll never use anything but BBEdit, but it would take a lot for me to not be using BBEdit on my Mac. But on iOS, I'm much more open. Yeah, it's a bonus if there's a Mac version. So you could, if something was weird, you could just open the Mac version of the iOS app and fix it, right? But yeah, I get you. Certainly. And I am writing in Markdown. I'm writing in plain text. I'm not interested in styles. This is one of the reasons that I don't use Ulysses, is that although Ulysses supports Markdown, it really wants you to treat it like a styled text editor,

like a word kind of thing. So like the hyperlinks get all, you know, turn into buttons and they hide the links and only show that it's text with an underlying link. And I don't want that. Like, I understand why other people might want that. And I talked to the people from Ulysses about it and they totally have a philosophy of what they want to do

with that app. And it just doesn't fit with how I write. And that's fine. But that means that it's not going to be an app that I use, because it doesn't fit with trying to keep it simple and keep it plain text. And, you know, use macros to help me generate my plain text, not hide it. to help me generate my plain text, not hide it. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Did you mention, are you still using the Matias Mini Tactile Pro? Yeah, so I have, normally I'm writing, like I'm writing more in my lap. That's a great configuration to write sitting on the couch.

I'm writing more in my lap. That's a great configuration to write sitting on the couch. Very nice. As it gets cooler into fall and winter, it's nice as a change of pace to leave my desk. And also, I don't have a strong heating out here in the office to go into the other room. And I can sit under a blanket and sit on the couch in the middle of the day if the kids are at school or whatever. And I've got the cat next to me and I'm writing on there. And that was generally where I used the bridge keyboard.

But right now I'm using the smart keyboard folio and that works great. But another change of pace that I like to do is to go work at standing up at the bar in my kitchen. And it's all to play for, because again, I'm open to other things. The nice thing about the Matthias, what is it, quiet laptop keyboard, which is the silver monstrosity, right, as you pointed out. It's thick. It's, you know, big kind of curved plastic bezels all around it.

It's very much the state-of-the-art Apple design of 2008. I typically, you know, more power to them. I can't stand the look of their products. Their new stuff all looks like Apple's modern stuff where it's thin with aluminum but those are also not the mechanical the fancy mechanical keys.

I agree. I think they need an industrial redesign for their mechanical stuff but they don't have it. I feel like they could do something that doesn't look like this, but still has all the features. Yeah, well, there are lots of other mechanical keyboards,

like the one I'm using now at my Mac. It has no bezels at all. It has an aluminum frame around the bottom, and that's it. Which is that one? It's great. Which is that one? It's a, what is this one?

So many keyboards. Yeah, I have so many. This is a Vortex. I forget which model it is, but it's a little mini. Because remember, I have the little tiny keyboards. Yeah, you do. So I'm using on the iPad out there right now, I'm mostly using that keyboard, that Bluetooth Matthias keyboard,

because it's got really nice mechanical keys. And it's Bluetooth, which really keys and it's bluetooth which really just means i don't have to if i'm carrying my ipad and that keyboard out there because i don't leave them set up out there it's my kitchen i uh it's nice not to have to plug anything in right i have a mechanical like a usb matthias keyboard that is white that i can plug in and use and i've got a whole bunch of other keyboards too. But again, there are lots of issues here because, you know, I got, I got a lot of keyboards. If it's not a Mac keyboard, um, on the Mac, you can flip command and control and so that they're in the right place.

If it's a PC keyboard and then, and then go about your business iOS, you can't do that. So if the PC keyboard, suddenly the key's in the wrong place and for keyboard shortcuts and stuff. And I don't like that. So it's gotta be a Mac keyboard or have a switch that lets it go into Mac mode. And then the other thing is just the size of it. If it's a big keyboard with a number pad or something,

I'm not really that interested in it because I don't want that. I want a smaller keyboard. So I continue, but in the end, I think my number one thing is just Bluetooth keyboards are better for this because I don't have to plug anything in. All I have to do is carry my stand and my keyboard out there and snap the iPad into it. And then I've got my landscape orientation writing machine that lets me focus and then I can turn it sideways. And in horizontal mode, I can turn it sideways and and in horizontal mode i can

i can do multitasking and stuff like that is there anything for this setup or you're just your general setup that you feel is missing like is there something that you wish was better but just doesn't exist well i um it's a good it's a good question the. The stands are still an open question. I think the viazon stand is still my favorite. The Tabitha is fine. If one thing that I haven't found yet, although I'm not sure I want to commit to this anyway, some people have sent in sort of mount arm stands where you can clamp it to something. Like I have my iMac clamped to my desk. And I've thought about that of like, well, what if I had that for my iPad?

And I would super investigate that if I had a place to put that. But I don't really. I don't want to put it on my desk where my iMac is. And I can't have a permanent permanently stationed iMac or iPad in my kitchen. So it's going to be, you know, I wish the stands were a little bit taller, but with the weight issue, they can't get much taller without toppling over or becoming, having a huge base and the tab of the, you can already, I mean, that base is really heavy. That's why it's because it can't, need it to not fall over um i don't

feel like i found the perfect keyboard that is that feels good to type on and that is easy to set up um but i've got you know who are we kidding i'm gonna try more keyboards so maybe i'll get there in the end no there's never going to be the perfect keyboard for you jason it's one of those things it's like it's the endless quest but quest, but it'll never actually come to pass. It's possible. It's possible. But I do think one of the nice things about the new iPad Pro is that it powers all these things, some of the Matthias keyboards especially.

But any keyboard that really had USB ports on it, those require more power because you've got to power the other ports. And some of them would just not work on the old ipads without plugging in that adapter and external power and that's not the case with the new ipad pros so that that makes it a little bit easier because then you can just sort of plug in anything with that simple usbc to usba dongle and then plug in the keyboard and it'll work so So I'll continue my quest there. But right now it's great. I mean, I honestly, I think having that dedicated thing,

dedicated writing machine, it's much less distracting. It's a good mode switch for me. I would say, I think at this point, I prefer writing on the iPad to writing on the Mac. I think in the last year that has come around where there are a lot of times when, and some of this is about my job, like when I'm doing podcasts and email and Slack and stuff in the morning, and then I'm like, I need to switch modes and write a column.

That's a good time to leave my chair and go somewhere else and write that column in a different context. But I do think also some of it is just that I have to be much more active about switching away from my writing to look at Twitter or look at Slack, and it makes me focus a little bit better. And in the stands, I can type with a big vertical orientation, which is great because I can see more of my story. And I actually really like writing in portrait mode. That's interesting.

I see quite a few people do that. And I get it, right? Because you see more of the words at one time. Yeah, well, if you're in landscape mode and you're writing, because long lines are no good. Long lines are bad for legibility. What you end up with is just enormous margins, and the text is running down the center.

And you turn the iPad, if it's in a stand, you just turn the iPad and now the margins are not ridiculous and you can see more context of what you're writing, which in some cases people don't want it, but I find it useful to do it that way. And then, like I said, I turn it into horizontal orientation if I want to bring up, like sometimes when I'm writing my columns I will be referring to things on like Apple's website and specs and prices and things like that and then I'll work where instead of having a big wide margin I've got one writer on one side and Apple's website on the other and I'm dragging in links and stuff like that all right should we take a break yeah today's episode is also brought to you by our friends

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maybe you're working on a design project and you have to use your entire Mac screen, but you want some reference material on the side. Well, now you have your iPad to do that. I've spoken before about like my plan to get a Mac Mini and plug in the Luna display and then access the Mac mini via my iPad. Luna display did this. They made a whole video about it too, which I'll put in the show notes, like to show how it's possible to do it. And it looks so cool. Like this, this little stand, then like the Mac mini on top of it. And they're just using the iPad pro as a screen for a Mac mini. It's really, really super cool. And you have this amazing flexibility for you. You have a touchscreen device to use with your Mac.

You can use your keyboards, Apple Pencil, and so much more. This is a super awesome piece of hardware to have if you have both of these devices. And if you listen to this show, you probably do have an iPad and a Mac. Well, now you can connect them together in ways you'd never even dreamed of. Listeners of this show get a wonderful deal of 10% off a Luna Display.

Just go to lunadisplay.com and enter the promo code UPGRADE at checkout to get a 10% discount. That is L-U-N-A-D-I-S-P-L-A-Y lunadisplay.com promo code UPGRADE at checkout to get 10% off. Our thanks to Lunar Display for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. So you mentioned that you published your iPad Pro review, and we've both had some more time to spend with the devices, right?

Then we've had another week, right? So we're living with them, working with them every day. And I just wondered if you'd had any additional thoughts or experiences that you wanted to talk about. up in the foothills where the air quality was a little bit better. And that meant I edit the incomparable on the weekend. And that meant that I was doing the editing on ferrite on the, on the new iPad pro, which I had not done before. I mean,

obviously I'd done on the old iPad pro a lot, but this, I was using the new model and I, and I brought the Apple pencil with me because I thought maybe I will try to use the Apple pencil features and ferrite, which I've never tried before. And, you know, part of that was just being resistant. Part of it was thinking that where is the Apple Pencil? Is it charged? All of those things. Whereas this one has been hanging around with the device pretty much since the start of it. And that's been so I know it's charged and I know it's paired and I know where it is. So I brought it with me and I decided, you know, it's a new iPad. I'm going to give this a try. And it took, it took a while for me to get it, but I did kind of embrace the idea of, we're going to try to edit this episode with the pencil. And so I sat at a table for a little

while and on a couch for a little while. And I edited that episode of The Incomparable using the pencil as well as my fingers to do it. But my usual workflow is entirely just my fingers for doing it. So integrating the pencil was different. I set up double tap on the pencil to be play pause so that I could do that without having to reach out every time and touch the screen with two fingers to tap it to do play pause. I'm not sure that was the right choice. I'm not sure how the way I hold the pencil because I'm really bad at writing and holding pencils in general. I'm not sure I kept on finding like, oh, I'm in an awkward position here. If I try to double tap, I'm going to drop the pencil. I did that a lot.

But in the end, it is the most time I have ever spent using the Apple Pencil because I don't draw or write in longhand. And so I can try out the Apple Pencil and doodle a stupid thing and say, yep, that's great. Okay. But I can't do what people like you can do who are more committed to using it. It's just, it's not my thing. But with Ferrite, I really got into it.

And I had the pencil set as a deletion tool. Plus, you could also move things around and tap to change the timeline and double tap on the pencil itself to do play and pause. And by the time I got to the end of the project, I was actually working very quickly. So much of what I do in editing podcasts is delete noises. I do strip silence. And then you can see where there's sort of stray noises, where there's echo coming from somebody's headphones, or they bump the microphone, or there's something going on in the background, their dog's barking, whatever.

And I do a lot of deletion. And on ferrite, that's a gesture, but it's like you have to put two fingers down in the right place and then swipe from right to left in order to delete something. And instead with a pencil, you just move it over that stuff and it disappears. And even if I'm editing somebody speaking and they've got a kind of a pause or they, um, they say there's long, like, um, uh, kind of thing with a pencil. I was able to see it in the waveform and drag over it to delete it.

And then triple tap on the remaining, you know, tracks and, and pick them up with all with the pencil and slide it together and solve that problem, which is, um, again, it's a little

more precise than my finger it's a little harder to hit the right spot with my finger using ferrite than with the pencil um and so it it took time i think i could get really good using it i'm not entirely convinced that the double tap gesture is the right one for play pause maybe there's a better gesture there um and i i've got i've got to think about like all of the ramifications of this. But it just makes me say what I have said all along about editing podcasts on an iPad, which is it feels, and I'm sure other people feel this way about drawing and things like that. It feels different, substantively different to edit something with your hands than with a keyboard and mouse.

And a little bit more like you're, you know, you're making it, you're hand crafting it in a way. And it isn't always the most efficient way to do it, although it's extremely satisfying to do it that way. And I think it might be more efficient in some ways. And I think in some ways it might lead to a better product because I noticed that I was thinking, oh, I could take that out. And normally I might leave something in, but I was like, no, oh, I could take that out. And normally, I might leave something in, but I was like, no, but I can just take that out with a pencil. And I can I can do it really quick. And on my Mac using logic, I might have said, man, I'll just leave it and I'm going to move on to the next thing. So there's some something like that, too. And yeah, so it

was a really fun experience to go through that. And at this point, ferrite can do everything else in terms of I that episode that posted this weekend of The Incomparable. It's got like, what, 15 chapters in it or 18 chapter markers in it. It's got art and all the MP3 tags exported and encoded as MP3 on my iPad and then FTPed up to the CDN using, uh, I think I used transmit to do it. And I did the whole thing on the iPad, other than the initial, um,

processing of the audio files, which I did do on my Mac. Cause I was originally planning on editing it. I had it all ready to go on my Mac to edit it. And then I, we, we decided in a very short amount of time, we were just going to leave for the weekend and,

uh, and it worked fine. So you can add chapters in far right too yeah oh yeah you can so and you can even you can either have them tied to the time code of the file or tied to the audio that's underneath the playhead and if it's tied to the underneath the playhead then as you move the the the project around the chapter marker will slide around too so it's actually a little better than logic so you were telling me about this over the weekend because i think you were proud of yourself for using the pencil right and thought yeah you're my yeah yeah you're mr apple pencil and i kept telling you how jealous i was of you for doing this.

And so this is what I was thinking about this, right? This sounds awesome, this way of editing. And I don't think that I would necessarily want to edit like this every week, but I would love to have the skill that you do with Ferrite that if I'm in a situation like you were in, which does happen, where I'm not at my desk or if i'm editing something long and don't want to be sitting at my desk for that amount of time like i want to be able to move around it sounds like a great thing but to do this to get to that

point it takes the time required to get to grips and learn like i would have to be learning ferrite from the beginning right and then getting all the way to where you are. And when you're learning a new piece of software, you're slower, right? Like you were just slower than if you're doing it under your usual workflow. And I was thinking about this. I think this is where a lot of the iPad criticism comes from because pretty much everything that you're doing, you have to learn again, right? Like there's things you already know. You have your workflow, it's your established flow of doing things.

And the iPad can do most of them, but it does them in a different way. And it requires you to learn. Like it's not that the device can't do it. It's that you need to learn a new way of doing it. And that's going to slow you down for a while and maybe frustrate you. So irrespective of how it will feel on the other end, which I know would be great, I'm hesitant to do it because I'm going to have to sit down and learn it. Yeah, this is a big part of a lot of the criticism we notice about the iPad Pro, right?

And this is the thing that actually makes me the most frustrated, is when somebody says, I can't do this. When what they mean is, it doesn't do it the way I'm used to. Now, sometimes they can't do it like we all nobody knows better than an ipad pro user that there are places where you hit a wall

and you're like oh wow i can't do this it's like well that's that you know but but a lot of these that i see especially in in reviews like mainstream reviews where some random person at a tv network or or website gets the job of writing the ipad review. And they say, oh, you can't do this. And the answer is, well, you can do that. It's just not the way you're used to. And it might be more efficient. It might be less efficient, but it's going to be different. And there's going to be a learning curve and that's going to frustrate you. And then you're going to write your review and say you were frustrated. And that is, um, that is not the same as it can't do it because the point and the underlying impression I get from these articles is what they're really saying is it's not a laptop, which is what I'm used to, and I wish it were like a laptop.

And that completely misses the point of the iPad, which is that it is not a laptop. It is not trying to be a laptop. It doesn't mean it couldn't be better. We said this last week. The software side really needs a lot of help. But this is a great example where the way I edit on a podcast on an iPad is totally different. And there's a lot of adaptation and there's a learning curve and it's going to take time. And the first time you do it, it is going to slow you down. Absolutely.

The first time I tried to edit something in Ferrite on my iPad, I was like, oh my God, this is so painful. And I actually wrote to the developer and I said, I ran into a lot of problems. And you know what the developer did? He was like, oh, that's good feedback. And there was an update that fixed a lot of those problems. Like that was also amazing. So full credit to Woojijuice, the makers of Ferrite for being super responsive to users about this stuff, too. It's got keyboard shortcuts in there that it didn't used to have. It's got this great pencil support. But the big point is, like, you have to jump in.

So for you, Mike, if you wanted to edit a podcast using this, it would be super scary, and it would be a big time commitment to do it. But I do think that, in the the end you would have a different kind of podcast editing experience out of it but a more flexible one which is what i i mean i would love to have like what this feels like to me is like a holidays project right you know what i mean like you got some time usual things aren't happening maybe now i'll give it a go because like i do really my my dream you know i'm not trying to put this into their mind is like when when marzipan exists that i could learn these apps right like i can these apps something

like uh i could move to stuff like ferrite and luma fusion and use them on my mac and on my ipad and then it's one experience that's what i really want you know because that's actually the the hardest thing right now is not that i can edit in ferrite or i can edit on logic it's that i can't move between them like i can't do the bb edit dropbox text file one writer thing i can't do that with uh with a video project or an audio project so i have to be all in on ferrite or all in on logic for a particular you have to make the decision before you begin where is this project going to start and end and like and i would really love more fluidity um because that's all of the other software that i use is like that right like as

you're saying my my text editor my twitter apps like slack and my email like they're all the same apps right like all of i like to buy into software that's everywhere i'm gonna be and these professional creation tools a lot of them aren't right now you know it's like i use pixelmator on my mac and pixelmator on my ipad and i don't really like pixelmator on my ipad like it's on my iPad. And I don't really like Pixelmator on my iPad. It's too slow. There's too many taps to get the buttons. They should have palettes, and I don't understand why they don't. It's slow, but I understand how to use it, so I use it.

So I'm looking forward to Photoshop because it looks like it's going to be more of a consistent user experience. And I'm hopeful for UIKit on the Mac that we're going to start to see a lot of these professional iOS apps that do exist have a second life on the Mac, which will bring people like me and you to a consistent user experience. I use a heavy music tool to make podcasts. That's what I do. It is not sustainable in the long term, right? Logic as the podcast editor. Like I would love a podcast editing tool as my only tool

because Logic Pro is like, this is a music app that I'm forcing to do the thing that I want it to do, right? Like I feel like I'm constantly fighting against Logic and like it has all of these features in it, which it's trying to get it to do, right? Like I feel like I'm constantly fighting against Logic and like it has all of these features in it, which it's trying to get me to use, but I have no use for them, right? Like metronome, it's no good to me.

Like I don't want a metronome. Well, sure, Logic is a, that's the thing. And I was talking to somebody about Logic for iPad and they said, well, you know, I can't do it for my giant music project that I've got because of this and this thing and this thing. I was yeah first off they should fix that too right but secondly the truth is that a lot of us are using a product that is designed for music professionals to do podcasts because we need it and it's the best we can get we're a subset of the audience it's not

built for us but we can adapt it and we use logic over anything else because if it's power and its capability in handling large files that that's why we use it ultimately right like it has tools that we need but other things like you know with some of the amount of tracks that we use and the file size is like garage band was really getting upset with me which was was why I moved to Logic. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. But we're still using 10% of the features, if that, of Logic. And that's something like Ferrite was built for podcast editing, basically, and other audio editing of spoken word. And it is, right, so it's a lighter weight and all that. I hear you.

Like, if Logic went on iPad and Ferrite went on on mac it would be an interesting question of what i would end up standardizing on i suspect it would be ferrite just because it is more directly uh addressed at what i do but it you know but either one i would get very excited just because of portability of projects like the idea that that adobe is is touting of these cloud psd files like right that sounds great like i because i use icloud in this way right like i have a numbers spreadsheet that i make on my ipad and then it's on my iphone and it's on my mac and i can just access it whenever i want right and it's the same with pixelmator like it's why i use even though pixelmator for ios is not necessarily what i want it to be i use it because then i can go between my mac and my ipad both of my ipads and the documents are all there like the chapter art that i made for

our merch chapter i made it on my ipad and then i went to my Mac today and just exported it so I could have it ready. Right. Because well, because one reason like the Mac version gives me quality can sliders for exporting images. But the iPad version doesn't really it feels like they made that app and then didn't really do a ton to it. Like they haven't really pushed it where it should go. And there are, I don't know, it feels like there are companies, was it Affinity, that are kind of coming in and really owning this space. And I've thought about, well, maybe I should check out Affinity,

but I'm like, no, no. In a couple of months' time, I'm just going to get Photoshop and then I'm just going to, that's just what I'm going to be on because it's Photoshop, right? And I'll have it on my iPad. Of course, that's what I'm going to do.

But I do like that idea, right? And I'll have it on my iPad. Of course, that's what I'm going to do. But I do like that idea, right? So the idea of having a podcast project, in a way, live in the cloud, however that might end up being, ideally what I would like is I have my files in Dropbox, and then these apps just pull it from Dropbox, and there's a way that that all works. I don't know. But like just the idea of this portability is very exciting to me in a world where I can't necessarily plug my iPad in just to a screen.

Although that possibility still seems like it's getting closer and closer all the time to me. You know, the idea of just having my iPad and plugging it in and then I can use a mouse and a keyboard and then i'm just editing there that's that's my ios 13 dream by the way of just like you you plug one cable in and now you have a mouse pointer and you have a keyboard and you can just do all the stuff there and that would be like the slow march to me of like reducing the amount of mac that i would need you know but that's all like a

dream for the future and we'll see but i will concur with you that the apple pencil is getting even more use out of me than ever before and it really is just this almost muscle memory now of just reaching out and grabbing it like i just pick it up and it's always ready to go i just pick it up and i love it because i can just grab it whenever i need it and i think it's wonderful i i've been thinking about this more and more and just this is one of my favorite like second generation products that apple has ever made right like where they've taken a product and then they brought out a new one it's like this almost reminds me of like the ipod nano from the mini or something it's like you took everything that everyone loved and then you went and made one that is so much better for basically

everyone that uses it like i feel like that's what they did for the apple pencil they made this thing and it did what it was supposed to do but it had some flaws and it had some weak points. So then they brought out a new one and it was like, oh, this is a better Apple Pencil in literally every single way. Yeah, everything is better about it. Like every part of it is better. And so I'm in love with it. I think it's changing the way that I use my iPad again,

all over again, right? And so it's making me be super aware of applications that are implementing new features for the Pencil in some way because it's making me be super aware of applications that are implementing new features for the pencil in some way because it's like oh well i might be more inclined to look at that one because it's enabling me to use this tool in new ways so i'm really excited about it i should say the one thing that i couldn't do on my ipad that i that I needed a Mac for in editing my podcast over the weekend was the opening of The Incomparable is spoken by a text-to-speech voice. It's Fred. It's the same voice that's used in original Mac stuff and in the Fitter Happier on OK computer by radiohead it's that voice it's a not very good old computer voice

and i have a i have a an automator action that basically generates that for me on my mac and the last time i checked shortcuts won't do it it will you can generate text-to-speech and you can i think pick a voice now but you can't output that to a file. I think it'll just speak it out loud. And so for that, I actually used screens to connect back to my server at home and ran that script and got the file and put it in iCloud Drive

or on Dropbox or whatever and I copied it from there. So that was one place where I cheated. Yeah, but you still use an iPad app to do it. That's true. All right, Jason, we should probably do some hashtag ask upgrade questions. I want to give some love to ask upgrade because we've been so full these past few weeks. We've not been giving it the time that it deserves.

But before we do, let me thank Pingdom for their support of this episode. Pingdom are brilliant because they help keep your websites that you love and the sites that you own online because Pingdom will monitor your site so you don't have to, so nobody else has to. They give you real-time feedback so you'll know what's going on with your website at all times because things break online every single day. Pingdom, in fact, detect 400,000 outages every day just of the websites they are monitoring. Can you imagine the sheer scale of problems that occur on the internet every day? Because the internet is a system of tubes.

Sometimes those tubes get blocked or they get holes in them or whatever. And when that happens, Pingdom will alert you. You can customize how you want to be alerted depending on the severity of the outage. They'll track and analyze your website's load time so you'll see exactly what's affecting user experience and you'll know who needs to take care of what and how it needs to be fixed to get things up and running for you. It's super, super awesome.

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Just go to Pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now, and you can get a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. So you can see exactly what Pingdom is all about before you commit. But then when you sign up for a plan, because you're going to love it, use the code UPGRADE at checkout, and you'll get a massive 30 of your first invoice that is pingdom.com relay fm and the code upgrade at checkout to get 30 of your first invoice our thanks to pingdom for their support of this show and relay fm hashtag ask upgrade time and our first question comes from nicholas nicholas wants to know jason which processor would you recommend picking up for a mac mini that is intended to be used as a home server is the i5 sufficient or should i go for the i7 mike hurley would also like to know

the answer of this question well so home server is not enough detail we need to know more but i'm gonna i'm gonna say something that i that I know Stephen Hackett will strongly disagree with, which is I have a home server. I bought the base model. the 10 gig ethernet because my iMac also does 10 gig ethernet and I bought a 10 gig ethernet switch with the hope that it would speed up my file transfers locally and maybe it hasn't maybe it hasn't we'll see but I use the i3 the base model and it's so much faster than my old Mac mini not surprising because my old Mac mini was very old right and my question is what are you using the processor for if it's a home server it's just kind of sitting there and what providing files or doing, you know, maybe it's doing a transcode

in for Plex or something like that. I can't tell you. I only have had the i3, not the i5 or the i7, but I think it's sufficient. I think what I would say is, I mean, if you've got the money to spend, go ahead and spend it.

But I feel like you could get, if you're not using this thing actively to do heavy workload stuff, you're probably not spending your money wisely in upgrading the processor. That's my feeling about it. I think people undersell the lower configs. This is a pretty fast system. If all you're using it for is a home server, I don't think you need to spend a lot of money on a processor upgrade because that processor is going to sit idle all the time. Aside from the ethernet though, did you upgrade anything else like the RAM or the storage from the base model?

Nope. You just got straight up base model. I mean, but it makes sense though, right? Because your Mac mini was probably worse in every configuration option than the base model and that was doing the job believe it or not the ssd in my mac mini was larger was a was a 256 because i installed that myself okay but i don't use it because i all my storage is on a big external storage device. I have a Drobo 5D. And so it's just a boot drive. There's nothing on it other than the system.

So it didn't need to be upgraded. Now, again, if you have a different situation, if you don't want to hang a big piece of storage off of it, if you'd rather just upgrade it to 2 terabytes SSD and have it sit there and do that, I would argue again that be the most efficient way, effective way for you to spend your money would be on external storage even then, because the cost of it from Apple is quite a lot. But for my use anyway, I was like, I don't need more here. I just don't need more. And I'm not

going to spend $1,500 on a Mac mini when I can spend, you know, 800 or 900. And so, yeah, I'm mostly one with the base. And I think that's, there's, it's okay. It's okay. So this is a question from David, and this is one that I can answer. Uh, I'm thinking of getting a Nintendo switch for our family for Christmas as David, the only console we have is the original Wii. What do we need to get beyond the Switch itself? Do we want extra controllers? What games? We have three kids. So, get an extra pair of Joy-Con because then you'll have

either two to four players that can play at a time because it comes with two but you want another two. I would suggest for adult hands to get a pro controller. It's much, much more comfortable to use. Not necessary, like it's not 100% necessary but i do recommend it and some game recommendations for fun multiplayer between a family i would recommend a

game called overcooked which is action-packed and fast and fun um i would say you know for some single-player experiences uh legend of zelda and mario od Odyssey, two of my favorite games of all time. So definitely worth checking out. Mario Kart, can't go wrong with Mario Kart. So always get Mario Kart. It's great for everybody. And I'm currently playing and adoring Pokemon Let's Go. It is a wonderful entry to the Pokemon series. It is especially good if you've never played a Pokemon game before, or like me, you've played every Pokemon game because you get the nostalgia, but it also has really wonderful drop-in drop-out co-op. So it can be really good for families to play together. Like if you're playing with a kid and they need specific help in a battle, you could jump in and help them out or whatever it is. So

that's really great. But the main thing I'll say about the Nintendo Switch is there are new games being added to the system like tons of them every single week it is a wonderful gaming system it continues to be my favorite console ever made if people in your family enjoy video games you literally cannot go wrong with a Nintendo Switch that is my recommendation I agree completely and

you're right about the controllers too joy cons are fun and you end up with four if you get the second set uh pro controller is much more uh comfortable much more comfortable yeah and there's a lot of great games out there for the so i'll say mario if you don't have mario kart mario kart is fantastic as a multiplayer game on the switch so you always should check it out. It's like it's an always, you know, every Mario Kart is always great for multiplayer, right? Like that is like the staple of multiplayer. Yep. Brent asks, for the last few years,

Apple has released iOS X.3 editions in the spring with a small handful of minor but welcome feature editions. You remember there's been some like the education stuff for the iPad. I think the previous one had the battery screens you know like after the uh battery problem that we had last year um so brent says usb uh c external drive access seems like a feature that would fit nicely here what do you guys think i think if they were going to add this feature they should do it then because it's it's almost become like a meme of the ipad right now that it can't do usb external storage even though i don't think many people would use it that much just everyone's

super aware of this thing that it can't do um so adding it would just shut a lot of people up basically it feels like a good feature to just add if it's possible to do um you know people like steve troughton smith seem to indicate that it it wouldn't be a mountain that needs to be climbed to add stuff like this into the system. So it feels like a good feature for this if that's the route that Apple wants to go down by adding features in iOS 12.3. Yeah, I think the real question is, is what is Apple's goal with the iPad software releases and how much does it think it's in damage control? Because if you think about it, we're in November now, they could prioritize a couple of things and roll them out in early next year and get them them out as part of ios 12 and say see these these issues that people had with the ipad pro are gone now right they could do that they could say file

access for for storage or like an update to the files app especially things that you would expect are not intrinsic to ios 13 at which this wouldn't necessarily be, probably. However, if one of the goals, and Mark Gurman says it is, he actually had a tweet over the weekend about this. He says one of the planned features of iOS 13 is a completely revamped Files app that includes a bunch of stuff people are complaining about. The challenge is if the people who work on iOS

have been working on a new Files app with the of it being part of ios 13 for the last who knows how long it's it may not be plausible for it to be pulled out and put in ios 12 if that's something that they're doing it's a bad idea because then it's like well we're gonna bring this thing that we've worked on or we can't we right we assumed that it would be on the new one and we can't pull it back, right? So I could see it and quite frankly, I don't look at this and say, oh, Apple is in huge damage control

with the iPad Pro. I think it's not too worried about it. So my gut feeling is that Apple is not going to rush in a couple of iPad features. Maybe they will. That'd be great. But if I had to guess, I'd say, no, they're going to stand by it because they know that in June they're going to announce those features in the iOS 13 beta. And then people will rush to install the beta and, uh, and they'll get those features and

won't that be great. So that's my, that's my guess. I would love it if they came, they came sooner because I could use them. But, uh, feeling is that they pulled them out of iOS 12, put them in 13 last summer, maybe according to Gurman. And they're on that track now. And unless there's an emergency, because Apple has been known to do that, where they prioritize something heavily, because they're getting beat up about it. But I'm not sure that the reviews that we've seen about the iPad are really enough of that. I think they're going to keep selling iPad Pros. I think it's going to be fine. And they know that next year, the OS is going to make a big leap, let's hope, in terms of iPad functionality. I would say that if there was a debate inside Apple about some

of this pro-level iPad functionality and whether how high a priority it was in general, including an iOS 13, that the reviews of the iPad pro probably will give a lot of ammunition to the people who say, we need to, we need to do this, right? Because what if there's some feature that has been kicked down the road and it might get kicked out of iOS 13. Now, somebody is like, no, we cannot do that. We are going to get, we're going to spend another year getting beaten up over the iPad, not being able to do this. It needs to stop. But I don't think that's going to happen. Everything that I've heard through sources like Mark Gurman says that this has been, you know, this has been

the plan for a while now is that iOS 13 is going to focus on the iPad stuff. And yeah, it's stupid that it's going to happen next year and that these things are here now, and they can't take advantage of that. But I don't think it's a crisis where Apple needs to push something forward just so it can say, see, we slapped some, you know, server support or some external storage support into iOS 12. I just I don't I don't think that would be the reason. But that would be the reason, by the way, it would be for being beat up in the press about it and public perception about it more than it would be about serving those users who like me who are desperate for file access. That would not be the reason. So Benjamin asks, Mike, with the removal of the

home button and the lack of pencil navigation controls, because you remember I was talking about like I liked to press the home button with the pencil but can't do it anymore. And I was saying, you know, the Apple Pencil can't access things like control center and notification center. Ben asks, have you thought about using assistive touch of your pencil? So assistive touch is that little home button dot which is on the screen which can be programmed to do a bunch of very interesting things right like you can do single taps double taps and triple taps for little options you can bring up a little menu that can allow you to produce like to perform

system actions and gestures and stuff like that i have tried it out but ultimately don't enjoy the experience with the apple pencil every time you tap it with the apple pencil it tries to move the button a little bit like it's it's not it's not perfect it's way better to use with your finger and if you're using my finger on it then i may as well do the gestures it is definitely an option and it's it's an interesting option but i don't think it's the one for me yeah i um i i think so i i i do wonder if if at some point pencil might given that that's a tentative surface uh if apple might add like they did with the airpods they might actually add extra gestures but not configure them by default um that that's an interesting move on Apple's part.

Like I could swipe down. For example, on some Android phones, you can swipe your finger down over the fingerprint sensor, and it pulls down the notification shade. Stuff like that. Very nice. I would like that very much. So the move that Apple made,

and I'm not sure whether it was because the software wasn't there or because they didn't want to train people into this complexity, but when they released the AirPods, they said, you can just double tap and it does a thing. And then they did an update

and they're like, oh yeah, you can now double tap. You can configure them independently and they can be different things. And like, okay, that's a big step forward. I wonder if they might do that at some point with the pencil, where there'll be a software update. And if you go into the pencils settings in the Bluetooth settings or wherever,

it'll be like, oh, you can now redefine, you can add all of these other gestures that are not turned on by default. And it may be one of those things where they know that some power users would use them, but they don't think that it's a good experience for your regular user. It's also possible that they built this touch surface, and then they realized that there were way too many accidental gesture interpretations, and that the clearest signal was the double tap, so they were going to stick with that. I don't know.

Yeah. the clearest signal was the double tap. So they were going to stick with that. I don't know. Yeah. So I would love to have some of that stuff, like to be able to have the pencil, have some programmatical gestures,

even if, I mean, I would love them for the system, but even for apps as well, right? Where I can do more than just the tapping. That would be really cool. Especially when, as you say, it's just like the AirPods, in theory it can support it. So, but I do, I think I do agree with the idea of like the AirPods. In theory, it can support it. So, but I do, I think I do agree

with the idea of like, not everything at once because you end up just overwhelming. It's good to have a starting point. And make the basic gesture rock solid. I think that that thinking about the software development part, having them say, look, I know we can do all of these things, but why don't we just ship it with double tap and make it that the double tap always works and everybody is going to be happy with it because it's a new thing and there's no it's not like with a touch service it's not like there's a button that does you know this button does something and this button does not do anything do not look at this button do not touch this button right it's not like that there's no obvious missing feature on the pencil. We know that it's a touch service, but there's no obvious missing feature there.

So they can ship it like that and ship it and have it be solid. And then if they want to, they can be working on the background on a more capable touch surface in the existing hardware for later. Yeah. And also, let's make sure that when it gets out into the world, people aren't complaining about activating it by accident all the time exactly oh yeah exactly right and then and then when you roll it out maybe you roll it out but it's you know it's not on by default and individual apps can support it and you can go into the system settings and support it but if otherwise it remains unchanged and the base approach is just solid that's you know maybe maybe i'm still holding

out some percentage chance that uh they built this thing for very ambitious sets of gestures and then realized that they people miss they misinterpreted the gestures too much and that they ended up keeping it simple because that was the only way to have it be a good experience. It's possible. And finally today, Chad asks, how would you feel if Apple released their pro apps like Logic and Final Cut for the iPad, but restricted them either to more new devices, right? So only the newest ones could use them because of power reasons. Or if they said, hey, only the 12.9 inch iPad Pro could use this because they need the screen real estate. What do you think? Would you be fine with that if they restricted it to certain models of the iPad?

I would not be surprised at all if stuff got restricted to certain iPad Pro generations. Wouldn't surprise me a bit. If this generation especially was a line that got crossed at some point where it's like it's just it won't work it needs we need all the power of the 2018 ipad pros um the 11 versus the 13 i don't know um i don't love that idea i could see why somebody might say that i did have somebody point out to me that they couldn't use logic on an 11-inch screen or even on an iPad screen. And my response was that I spent years editing podcasts in Logic on an 11-inch MacBook Air.

Yep. So I'm a little skeptical that an 11-inch screen couldn't support these apps. It would be tight, I know. So I would not love it if they differentiated based on screen size. I don't think Apple's ever really done that in the past and uh it's much more likely that they would say sorry 2018 only yeah i think there might be some ios 13 features that will be 2018 ipads only

right they've done that in the past like even the current multitasking you get different results depending on how old your device is so like some apps can't do the slight like three apps at once on screen or whatever you know like it's a there are like ram constraints processor constraints to what can be done so but we will see we will see i continue to be very excited for june i said this on connected and i'll say here too though like i've really people just got to get in mind that like we don't know what 13 is going to be and we can't assume it's going to fix everything and make the ipad perfect because i fear that like that is way too much of the conversation right now as people like oh but it will be fixed in ios 13 like we've

had some i've been seeing some questions come in and some feedback come in where people are starting with the assumption that everything is fixed what do you think about this and it's like we can't start with that assumption though like the the general consensus amongst people that pay attention to this stuff and people that have information is that or at least have believed to have good information right is that there will be enhancements in ios 13 but it's not going to be like oh well now everyone can replace their macs like i don't think we're going to get to that level it's just going to make people that use ipads already they're going to be really happy and it might bring some more people in but it's not going to be like the magical fix for everything do you agree yeah you can never make assumptions like that that's that's like a i feel like whenever you buy any hardware the golden rule is never

assume more features will be added or software problems will be fixed in an update because i've had that happen to me before where you buy the hardware and you're like well this new thing's going to happen and they're working on a new thing. And the end, what they do is they announce a new piece of hardware that has the new software on it. And the old hardware never gets it. You can't make assumptions about this stuff. So I think it's great right now that we're just imagining that iOS 13 will solve all of our problems. But the fact is, it's always going to be a more complicated reality than that. That was true, actually, back with iOS 11, and even iOS 9, when we were like, finally,

multitasking, and oh, they're going to fix the multitasking. And every, not only, you know, when they address your problems, sometimes they won't address your issues, and you'll be like, ah, I've got to wait again, they didn't address my issue, maybe they're never going to do it. But even if they do address the issues that you've got, sometimes they do it in a way that you're like, oh, this brings other issues. This is not perfect because, of course, it's reality and nothing is perfect.

So hard to make those assumptions. Thank you to everybody who sent in a question today. You can just send in a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade and it goes into a document for us to pull from. Or you can send in a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade and it goes into a document for us to pull from or you can send in a more fun question for the beginning of the show with the hashtag SnellTalk. Don't forget to go to UpgradeYourWardrobe.com to get your Dongletown t-shirts and upgrade enamel pins.

The t-shirts are on sale and the hoodies are on sale until December 4th. So make sure you do not delay and buy today thank you to Pingdom, Lunar Display and Fresh Books for their support of this show you can find Jason at sixcolors.com and he is at jsnell on Twitter I am at imike

on Twitter and Instagram this show is a part of RelayFM you can find Upgrade and many other shows RelayFM at relay.fm slash shows many other shows, RelayFM, at relay.fm.shows. I'm sure you might find something new there to listen to on your commute every day. We would appreciate it. But as always, thank you so, so, so much for tuning in to Upgrade. We love you all dearly.

Upgradeys, Upgradeys voting, the voting form, the Google form, is in our show notes too. Don't miss out on having your say in the fifth annual Upgradeys. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, everybody.